On Illegal Immigration - Thomas Purcell

3 years ago

I was talking with a friend about illegal immigration and its effect on the costs of public health care the other day, and he gave me the usual argument that they should be rounded up and deported because of costs etc. but there's a more important issue at stake here that only a few in the media have spoken about.

It is wrong to allow illegal immigration because it exploits the poverty stricken.

I don't blame immigrants who desire to come to this country by either by hook or by crook. America is a great nation, and is the only country I know of that has to patrol its borders and provide law enforcement to keep millions from swarming in. Interestingly enough, it is also one of the only countries that still maintain a strong capitalistic and free political system .The admission process into the US is a difficult, arduous and expensive one, and those that are poverty stricken and desperate see illegal immigration into the US as their only way out.

However, most people miss the point. By allowing illegal immigration and not taking an aggressive stance to close the border and enforce the law, you effectively allow those that are here legally to exploit vast pools of cheap labor, and disallow those that are doing a share of the work of building the economy in the vast benefits of being a citizen.

Now, those that want more open borders will make the same argument. But their solution is to not enforce the law and look the other way. This is not the spirit of a properly run nation. A nation defines itself by its borders, its language and its laws. To ignore the enforcement of those laws is anathema to building a functional society.

Too many interests want the illegal immigration in this country for their own profit. Large corporate farms, construction companies and other labor intensive industries see it as a way to access cheap labor. Unions want lots of illegal immigration because they know eventually they will either get some form of amnesty or their children will be legal as ‘anchor babies’, and eventually be union members (as lower income people typically enter the blue collar force first). Political parties see it as not wanting to alienate a significant part of the voting bloc.

To continue to allow a relatively open border policy though is tantamount to a form of class slavery, however. It forces people into a living situation where they cannot reap the benefits of the work they perform. In essence, you begin to have a labor class, composed of the illegal immigrants combined with the lower educated, as well as the victims of those that make poor life decisions (such as felons and the addicted), and you have a wealthier upper class that benefits from cheap labor at the expense of the labor class.

We must close those borders. We must close them so that the working wage in the country will begin to rise again for the labor class. We must close them to provide millions of jobs to those that are out of work. We must close them to prevent massive amounts of the population ending up on state relief, such as in LA County were reports are that 1 in 4 families are on some sort of government dole. We must enforce the immigration laws to control the expansion of drug gang related crime into our neighborhoods- gangs that prey on the weak, the poor and those that are afraid to seek the protection of the law. We must have a working class that is part of society, not living below it, and a working class that has hope for a better future for not only their children but for themselves.

We must close the border because to protect a balanced society, and the integrity of our legal foundations.

How can you expect someone who crossed into this country illegally to be a part of a functioning society, when they break the very first law of the land?

Companies will argue, 'well we need that labor because no one else will do these jobs'. No one else will do those jobs because of the low prevailing wage. If that pool of illegal immigrants were not in the labor pool, the prevailing wage would be much higher, as competition for labor became more difficult. Yes, prices would rise, but so would wages and the standard of living for all.

You can't get there by granting amnesty either. It is the same as telling a child you can sneak cookies out of the cookie jar because eventually one day you will be old enough to buy them on your own. The laws of the land must be enforced so that both the forces that seek illegal immigration get the message that laws in this country are enforced, and so illegal immigrants respect the new country they seek to make a home in.

The more we allow illegal immigration, the more we keep a portion of population living in the nether world of 'migrant worker' the more our country will begin to resemble the third world nations they seek to free themselves from. A nation where the law is applied unequally, where large portions of the population live in slums and the elite benefit from their labor, is not a nation that America was built to be.

Close the border- not just build a fence. Man it. Light it. Patrol it. Have those that are caught here illegally immediately deported. We don't need to house them in large compounds rebuilt from nursing homes, we need to push them back through the gate to where they came from.